Seven-Song of Death

by Georg Trakl

So dawns the blue face of spring. Beneath the suckling trees
a darkness strays into evening and demise.
The blackbird’s feeble complaint is caught.
The stifled night appears, a wild bleeding,
dirge burrowing deeper into the hillside.

Flowering apple-branches sway in the damp air.
Tangles unhinge their silver,
death rattles over the night’s fluttering eyes, clatter of stars,
the whispered song from the cradle.

Down to the blackened woods the sleeper, arisen, descended,
and the blue spring, it wheezed its way through the valley,
that those bleached eyelids receded
wordlessly over his snow-covered face.

And the moon hunted the red beast
from its cave.
And sighing, it died—the bitter lament of women.

The white stranger, luminous, raised his hands
to the one star.
In silence the dead abandon their ruined tenement.

O the blasted stature of man—forged out of loveless metals,
night and horror in the sunken woods
and the crematory wilderness of beasts,
the windless eye of the soul.

On the blackish barge he embarked down the shimmering currents,
plenary of purple stars, and the branches, budding green,
sank upon him,
poppy born from a silver cloud.